The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with
Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter
refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and
psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in the
"economic interpretation of history." It has remained for George Bernard
Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the
ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid
multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant
proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the
orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury. "But indeed the
more you degrade the workers," Shaw once wrote,(3) "robbing them of all
artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their
fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure
and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of their instinct
for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct
as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there
comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is
diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.' But your slaves are
beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits: and their poverty
breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness."
Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident
throughout the writings of the Marxians. The Marxian Socialists,
according to Kautsky, defended women in industry: it was right for woman
to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man! Man
must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde,
because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man! Bebel, the great
authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied
the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive
fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an
"anti-generative" effect upon the agricultural population of Upper
Bavaria! Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance
of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human society, a society
perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum
efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless
proletariat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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